


Apothecary on Fire

by TheFandomLesbian



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, snamione
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 07:42:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11249319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFandomLesbian/pseuds/TheFandomLesbian
Summary: Rita Skeeter comes to Snape's apothecary seeking an interview, but a fierce lioness fervently guards the Potions Master's livelihood and honor.





	Apothecary on Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a First Lines challenge.  
> First Sentence: At first it had been a day like any other, until she came in.  
> Theme Prompt: good becomes bad  
> Word Prompt: potions

 

At first, it had been a day like any other, until  _ she _ came in. Hermione recognized the face of Rita Skeeter from the moment the blonde reporter entered the apothecary where Hermione had taken up work. The brunette stewed over three cauldrons at the same time; Professor Snape had absolutely no mercy on his shopkeeper. But he paid fairly, and his reputation kept the paparazzi away…usually. “Rita,” Hermione greeted bluntly as she waved her wand to stabilize the cauldrons. She forced her soulless customer service smile and asked, “What can I do for you today?” She didn’t want Snape accusing her of chasing off his customers. 

The reporter waved her arm. She had the Quick Quotes Quill clutched between her fingers already. “Surprisingly, princess, I’m not here for  _ you _ ,” sneered the reporter. “I need Snape. Take me to him, girl. Tick tock. I’m on a deadline.” She tapped her wrist where a watch could have been. 

Hermione straightened. “What business do you have with Professor Snape? I’m not to allow anyone in the back room, and I’m not to disturb the professor unless there’s an emergency.” Any respect she had once had for Rita had dissolved completely during the war; she had read far too many copies of the  _ Daily Prophet  _ slandering all muggleborns and half-bloods to ever expect a shred of decency from Rita Skeeter. Carefully, she maintained eye contact with the sharply-dressed witch, chin up and jaw set. She would not allow herself to be intimidated into bothering Snape. 

To her horror, Rita flipped open the notebook. “Right, right. He has the Gryffindor princess wrapped around his little finger, that’s for certain.” The quill scribbled without her touching it. “Maybe Professor Snape has always fancied Gryffindor muggleborns.” Hermione’s face flushed, and she jerked her hands into fists. “Oh, bothersome girl, if you must know, I’m writing Professor Snape’s biography. Some direct quotes from him would be quite nice, you know. It sells so much better when I have his approval…” 

“Yes, go on and write a biography about him. Tell all of his secrets. He’d have your head on a silver platter before the first copy was off the shelves,” Hermione growled. The quill kept on scribbling. “Or maybe you plan on slandering him, like you did to Dumbledore. Professor Snape has had enough of the press for a bloody lifetime--we all have. He wants to be left in peace.” 

Purring, Rita rocked back and forth. “That’s why he’s stationed you out here, right? A fearsome little lioness to guard the snake’s dark lair. Hm, princess? Oh, what a shame. It must be miserable working for such a greasy old dungeon bat.”

Hermione was aware that Rita had baited the hook. She didn’t care. She bit anyway. “He treats me well and pays me well, and we generally don’t have to worry about busybodies like you sticking their nose in our business.” Stealing a glance back at one of her potions, she pressed, “Are you going to buy something or not? I have work to do.” Magic could only stabilize a potion for so long; if she stopped at a crucial step, it could explode even under a stasis charm. “We’re here to sell potions and salves, not our stories.” 

The pad shifted in her direction, and she spied the words, “ _ Granger’s eyes mist over with fondness as she discusses the close relationship that she had Snape have forged since the end of the war in a small shop called the Snapothecary. Business has flourished for the owner since he permanently resigned from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and was pardoned for his war crimes. But one can’t help but wonder if things are looking much better for Snape behind the scenes in the apothecary, where he has gained at least one hopefully fervent and loyal follower. _ ” She wanted to spit in fury, but Rita continued her soft voice, “He treats you well, does he? _ How _ well, Miss Granger?” 

She had talked herself into a corner, and Snape was going to  _ kill _ her. “As well as an ordinary boss treats an ordinary employee! I brew easy potions for him and sell the merchandise, and he invents the new potions and teaches me the recipes so that I can copy them for distribution. If you’re trying to imply that there’s something else between us--”

“Oh, honey, I’m not trying to imply anything. But you, on the contrary, seem to be providing me plenty of information, and from that, I can only infer that something must be tying you to the professor. After all, a pretty young witch such as yourself has no business working for such an ugly old man--” 

“He is _ not _ ugly!” Hermione cut in, and instantly, she regretted it. The quill went to scribbling again, and the tips of her ears tinted red. The look on Rita’s face expected an elaboration. “And he’s not  _ old _ ,” she whispered under her breath. Pinching her eyes closed, she wished that Rita would disappear, but when she opened them again, there stood the reporter, clear as ever before. “I would like you leave now, Miss Skeeter,” she addressed, voice steady and level. “And you should dispose of this interview.” 

The reporter did not shudder. Instead, she lifted her wand to Hermione’s face. “There are many things you would like, and there are many things I should do. The point remains--I need to speak to Snape. Take me to him.”

She grasped her own wand inside her sleeve. “Leave.” 

“No.” Rita lifted her wand, and Hermione lifted her own. “Does the little Gryffindor princess want to duel?” she hinted with a grin. “I am not so violently inclined. _ Confundo! _ ” 

Hermione did not need her mouth to conjure a shield, only flicking her wrist. Rita dove to the right. Behind her, a vase shattered and hit the ground. “Leave, Rita!” She jabbed her wand in the air, and a white flash of a Stinging Jinx spritzed toward Rita’s face. The reporter dodged it again, and this time a jar of salve spilled onto the floor. 

The blonde snatched back up to her feet. “This is how we’re playing, huh?  _ Alarte Ascendare! _ ” 

This time, Hermione wasn’t fast enough, and she found herself sailing into the air. She hit her head hard on the wooden ceiling, and one hand flew back to her head. “Dammit!  _ Anteoculatia! _ ” she howled, and promptly, two antlers sprouted from Rita’s head. The blonde lost her concentration. Her spell lifted. Hermione landed flat on her stomach on the stone floor, knocking the breath from her lungs. She lay there, stunned, and gasped with a dark choking sound. 

But Rita did not grant her the moment to rest. “You bitch!” she fumed. “My beautiful hair!” As she stood, she rammed her new antlers into a shelf. It teetered dangerously, and then it collapsed. The roar of shattered glass caused Hermione to roll onto her back and grapple for her wand. She had scraped her face and limbs. “All because you won’t admit you’re shagging the Potions Master!  _ Avis! _ ” A flock of birds ejaculated from the tip of Skeeter’s wand. They freely knocked down products and dove upon Hermione. 

The sharp beaks and wings drove her to her feet, and her blood ran to a hot boil. It also trickled down her arms and face and neck. A sharp pain in her ankle caused her to lean on the counter with a gasp, and blackness hazed around her vision. “ _ Colloshoo! _ ” she gasped, latching her opponent’s feet in place. “I am  _ not _ shagging Professor Snape. Please leave.” Her spotty vision flicked back to the door. Surely Snape would emerge at any moment. He had to have heard the crashes of shattered glass. 

“You’re a terrible employee. I asked for your manager!” snarled the antler-bearing woman. “You filthy Mudblood! You need more convincing!  _ Crucio! _ ”

Hermione yelped, “ _ Protego! _ ” like a wounded dog. The blue forcefield caused the red light to bounce back onto another shelf. This one did not fall slowly like the first one. It rolled quickly, and it struck another shelf, and then another, and then another, until every free-standing shelf lay on the floor with its contents spilled onto the floor. Some sizzled in reaction with one another and smoked and fumed, so that a foul-smelling gas rose up. “We need to get out of here,” she puffed to Rita, but Rita wasn’t listening, wand still proffered. 

“ _ Confringo! _ ” Hermione ducked to the side desperately. She made it only a few steps before her broken ankle gave out, and she collapsed on the floor. The wall behind her exploded in a burst of flame and glass. Hurling her arms over her face, the shards spritzed into her skin, sharp and shallow slices. A loud sizzling started beyond where the remnants of the wall fell in a haze into her potions. She peered up from between her sliced arms to the cauldrons. All three of them had begun to boil over and froth angrily. 

The fumes consumed the shop in an acrid gray mist. Hermione buried her mouth in her elbow to cough. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she wheezed again, struggling to pull herself up to her feet, to distance herself from the cauldrons about to explode. But her broken ankle caved underneath her again. She lost sight of Rita in the smoke. Crawling onward, she tried to hold her breath and keep from inhaling the fumes that pumped her head full of dizziness. Somewhere beyond her, a fire crackled; the flames from her cauldrons had gone awry. 

Then, the first explosion shook the shop. Hermione curled into a tight ball. The hot fluid spattered her in a drizzle. She cried out from the heat. Welts began to raise up on her hand where the toxic potion struck her. The thought occurred to her,  _ I’m going to die here,  _ and she wondered why she hadn’t thought it yet. Snape wasn’t coming to save her. He wasn’t sworn to save her. He was sworn to save Harry. She didn’t matter to him.  _ I hope he’s okay.  _ The fire, the knocked out wall, the collapsing shelves, all should have drawn him up out of the basement to investigate. He was no coward. Something must have happened to him. A stroke, or a heart attack. Any assortment of things could have incapacitated the Potions Master.  _ And I was upstairs arguing about his honor while he was dead downstairs.  _

She tried to wriggle farther away, but the smoke had blinded her. Somewhere, she had dropped her wand. Her hands grappled about for it, and instead they found a mop of hair. “Rita,” she choked out. She clung to the hair. She didn’t want anyone to die. Not even Rita Skeeter. And she surely didn’t want to die with Rita Skeeter. 

A muffled, rhythmic sound thudded just beside her, almost like footsteps at her head. The second cauldron exploded, but no potion showered her.  _ Must’ve crawled far enough away.  _ Then she felt something coil around her chest, warm and strong and inviting, the way she had always imagined death, the way death was depicted in all of the stories. Whimpering, she dug her fingers deep into Rita’s scalp and held on tightly. She didn’t want to die. “Let go, you stupid girl. Let go! Leave her.” Warm hands pried at hers until she relinquished Rita’s hair. Then the coils of death, warm like arms, wrapped around her and lifted her up, carrying her from the shop, now consumed in flames and toxic fumes, into the sunlight and clean spring breeze.  _ Death doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it might,  _ she thought drowsily. In fact, death smelled pleasantly like dried herbs and potions ingredients. Her hands clutched at the front of a soft cotton robe, and she allowed herself to succumb. 

* * *

 

As Severus Snape staggered free of the flames and rubble that now comprised his apothecary, he wondered what the  _ bloody hell  _ had happened in the span of twenty minutes since he stepped out of the back door to head down the street and purchase some more bubotuber pus. When he headed back down the street, someone had howled to him, “Snape! Your shop is on fire!” and he looked up just in time to see the glass windows shatter out of the apothecary, the roof partially caving in from a collapsed wall, and fumes and smoke exhaling from all the shop’s orifices. 

With Hermione Granger’s body slumped unconscious in his arms, he directed his swaying steps to the patch of grass across the cobblestone street. It was a soft enough landing, he supposed, when his knees collapsed underneath him. His head spun round and round, and he closed his eyes to suck in deep breaths of the clean air, refusing to succumb to the floating, light-headed feeling that followed. Beside him, Granger uttered a low groan. He cast his eyes sideways at her and pushed himself up on his shaky hands. “Granger,” he wheezed. Her complexion had gone ashen, soot-streaked, thick mounds of hair shedding glass and smoke. 

He seized her face and patted her face sharply with the flat of his palm. “Wake up. Granger. Wake up.” She didn’t respond to his contact. “Oh, Merlin,” he grunted. 

The crowd across the street gathering in front of his shop felt very distant, but when he heard someone call, “There’s another woman inside!” he remembered the way Granger had clutched at Rita Skeeter’s hair while he attempted to lift her.  _ Bloody martyr,  _ he cursed her inwardly. Leave it to a Gryffindor to save even the most despicable person or die trying. 

“Don’t.” His own raspy voice didn’t carry the way he intended, throat gravelly and filled with soot. The crowd didn’t listen. They couldn’t hear him. “Don’t!” he called. “Don’t go inside! The fumes are toxic!” 

If anyone heard him, they offered no indicators. Two women reduced what was left of the front wall. Promptly, the ceiling began to cave in, and they fell back. A man behind them shouted, “We need to call the Aurors!” as one of the women tried to push through the wreckage. She pressed a hand over her mouth and nose, but her step began to sway, and another man pulled her back, shaking his head. 

_ I can’t worry about that right now.  _ “Granger,” he repeated in a grating voice. He sharply patted her cheek again. “You foolish girl. Wake up.” Her head turned and nuzzled into his touch with a rough grumble rising in her throat. “Yes, that’s right. Look at me. Look at me. Granger!” 

Her big brown eyes reluctantly slipped open to focus drowsily upon him. The lids hung heavily, like she couldn’t be bothered to open them all the way. “‘Fessor Snape?” she grunted. Her mouth formed a little O, and she fought to cough. 

“ _ Anapneo! _ ” he whispered with a tap of his wand. Soot flew out of her mouth, and she gasped for her breath. One small, clammy hand still clung to the front of his robes. He wrapped his around it to try and dislodge its hold. But the lazy drooping of her eyelids distracted him from his quest. “Stay awake. Granger, tell me what happened.” He didn’t really care what had happened--it was a matter of backseat urgency, appropriate for another time when her injuries had been healed--but he didn’t want her to fall asleep. 

Pale lips twitched a few times as she processed his words, and then she mumbled, “Rita wanted an interview,” in a somewhat drunken voice. “Wouldn’t give it to her. She tried to confound me. Kinda snowballed from there.” The slur wavered up and down on the octave. “Is she okay?”

Cursing the Gryffindor chivalry, Severus held her gaze evenly. “I don’t know,” he answered, voice flat, because he didn’t care about Rita Skeeter’s well-being. Granger pulled her gaze away from his, averting her eyes into the grass. It didn’t disguise the tears that pooled there. He didn’t mention them anyway. 

With several cracks of Apparition, Harry Potter and his team of Aurors appeared on the scene. Neither Potter nor Weasley seemed to notice the injured victim on the sidelines. A woman rushed to them instead. “I’ll get her to St. Mungo’s,” she promised him. She had odd blue-green eyes like a pond covered in algae. “Are you hurt?” 

“I’m fine.” He looped his fingers underneath Hermione’s and detached her hand from the front of his robes. 

The young woman’s eyes widened when he severed from her, but she only managed to gasp, “Professor, don’t leave--” before the Auror Disapparated. As he sank back, exhausted, into the grass, it occurred to him vaguely that, for the first time, he had thought of her as Hermione, and not simply Granger. 

* * *

 

Much later that evening, Hermione waved her hand in tired farewell to Harry and Ron. She had had to review the whole event with the two of them, especially the part where Snape saved her life. Ron, in particular, doubted that part and insisted that she must have hallucinated, while Harry was more willing to accept her account of the story. Turning her head away, she gazed out the window of the hospital with a sigh. It was almost eight o’clock. The healers had successfully mended her ankle and all of her cuts and her cracked ribs, but they wanted to keep her overnight for observation in case the spattered potions had any long-term effects. 

Eyes falling closed, she sucked in a deep breath and sighed, trying hard not to think about Rita Skeeter or her lime green Quick Quotes Quill or her ridiculous fantastic storytelling or her ugly blonde hair or the texture of that hair as she clung to the collapsed body of the reporter. By the time Harry and Ron had managed to recover her body without poisoning themselves and their team, she was beyond help. Hermione lifted a fist to her eyes and dashed away the tears that budded there. “Bloody bitch doesn’t deserve to be cried over,” she muttered to herself. 

“Quite right, Miss Granger,” purred the dark velvet voice of Professor Snape. She straightened in her bed and jerked over to look at him. He looked the same as ever, if a little more rumpled than usual, in his black robe and cloak with stringy hair dangling about his face. He had a smudge of soot across his nose. It cast the rest of his pale face in a stark contrast. She remembered what she had told Rita, a heated snarl of, “ _ He is  _ not _ ugly! _ ” It felt ridiculous. She had burned down the man’s livelihood and killed a woman in the defense of his honor. 

“Have you come to fire me?” she finally mumbled, not able to look him in the eye. 

He snorted, and the derisive sound drew her sheepish gaze back to him. “Hardly. Perhaps I should. But right now, that would be the equivalent of kicking a wounded dog.” He crossed his arms and leaned in the door frame. “Is there a particular reason they decided to hold you?” 

She swept her gaze over him. “They wanted to make sure that the mixed potions wouldn’t have any residual effects where I got spattered. They’re letting me leave in the morning.” Part of her told her it was unlike Snape to care, but another part appreciated the fact that he had asked. 

“Then I expect you at work by noon for your usual shift. We have some reconstruction to do.” _ Of course _ , she griped internally. Leave it to bloody Snape to want her back at work the day after she almost died in a fire. “Goodnight, Miss Granger.” He turned to leave. 

“Professor!” she called abruptly before his lean frame left her room, and he paused mid-step. “You--You saved my life. Again. Thank you.” And for the first time, he had nothing to earn, no part to play, that factored into her continued existence. He had saved her just because he could. Maybe because he wanted to, though she wouldn’t venture that far. 

His slender shoulders relaxed, and his lips curled in an easy expression, not quite a smile, but certainly not a grimace or a frown. “Sleep well, Hermione,” he said. The sound of his footsteps in the hallway echoed in her mind until she fell asleep. 

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
